In a large scale cloud computing environment, the use of various processing and computing resources may be available at a certain cost rate. There is often a balance between the cost of resources and optimal performance. In some situations, cloud computing products or services may be offered to provide better financial rates, but with certain drawbacks. Accordingly, a large scale cloud processor may seek to either rectify or mitigate drawbacks to obtain optimal performance at desirable rates.
One popular remote computing service provider that comprises a cloud computing platform is Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), AWS offers several services, including but not limited to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2”). EC2, in general, is a web service that provides cloud accessible compute capacity in an elastic environment that can automatically scale up or down, depending on the need. EC2 provides users with the choice of multiple instances, configured to fit different use cases. Instance types may comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity. For example, through AWS EC2, instance may include general purpose instances (T2, M3), memory optimised instances (R3), graphics optimized instances (G2), storage optimized instances (I2, HS1), and—of particular relevance to the present invention—compute optimized instances (C1, CC2, C3). Compute optimized instances generally provide high performance processes.
AWS has recently introduced the C3 instance type, which has certain attractive attributes (cost, performance, etc.), However, older instance types C1 and CC2 are useful in batch data processing environments such as Apache Hadoop. Hadoop, in general, provides a framework for storage and large scale processing of datasets on computing clusters.
New instances C3 appear to offer significant advantages in various ways over previous instances. Specifically, as set forth in Table 1 below the previous instance of C1.xlarge can be compared with the new instance C3.2xlarge.
TABLE 1Instance MemoryIstanceTypevCPUECU*(GiB)Storage (GB)Pricec1.xlarge82074 × 420$0.520 perHourc3.2xlarge828152 × 80 SSD$0.420 perHour
It can be seen above that new generation instance c3.2xlarge offers: (i) 40% better performance, in terms of EC2 compute units (ECU is an EC2 compute unite that sets forth a relative measure of the integer processing power of an AWS EC2 instance); (ii) over twice the memory; (iii) solid state device (“SSD”) storage; and (iv) 19% less expensive per unit. Moreover, c3.2xlarge supports enhanced networking capabilities in a virtual private cloud (“VPC”).
Accordingly, in order to utilize the advantages present in new instances such as but not limited to C3 instances, system adaptations may be desirable to account for small, local, instance storage.